Born on February 14, 1959, in Mutoko, Rhodesia, Tsitsi Dangarembga spent her early childhood in England, where her parents pursued their academic education. She and her brother completely forgot their native language, but in 1965 she returned with her family to Rhodesia and relearned Shona. As an adult Dangarembga attended Marymount Mission School in Mutare (formerly Umtali), and later completed her education at an American convent school in Salisbury (now Harare). She taught for a while in Rhodesia, then moved to England again to study at Cambridge University. But homesickness and the racism she confronted in England drove her back to her own country just a few months before it was transformed as the result of a bitter civil war. Whitedominated Southern Rhodesia became the politically black-dominated republic of Zimbabwe. Dangarembga enrolled in the psychology department at the University of Zimbabwe; the university Drama Group produced three of her plays—She No Longer Weeps, The Lost of the Soil, and The Third One. But it was her debut novel, Nervous Conditions, that won her international acclaim. She finished the novel three years before its release, but was unable to publish it sooner in Zimbabwe because of the antagonistic reception of male reviewers.
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